


Place to Belong

by enmity



Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:01:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26116867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enmity/pseuds/enmity
Summary: In the dream she had been an ordinary child.
Relationships: Riku/Xion (Kingdom Hearts), Roxas/Xion (Kingdom Hearts)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	Place to Belong

In the dream she had been an ordinary child. A boy her age, with brown hair and eyes a familiar shade of blue. The sand stinging between his toes as he sprinted towards the horizon, the sky over his head blinding in the heat of summer, and there were his friends too, heard but not seen: their beckoning, friendly and growing louder the closer he came to the raft, waiting at their little corner of the beach like a secret shared. They’d called aloud a name that wasn’t hers, but even now she could recall the pull of it, urging her to get up on her feet and run, run and chase after the open warmth in that voice, a boy and a girl chanting in disordered unison, Sora. _Sora!_

“Xion?”

Her smile was a flicker on her face, shyly turned towards the sun, to the hand he’d outstretched for her. She took it. Warm, even though the glove, and he was worried for her, she knew. So she kicked the dirt off her heels, thin fingers flexing as she marched a brave step forward, the keyblade a familiar weight leaned against one aching shoulder.

“You alright?” Roxas called when she didn’t answer straight away.

“Of course I am!” She could feel his gaze on her back, watching for the slight drag of her steps, the warning signs of a pulled muscle. The pavement was wet, slick with mud and rainwater. It had rained recently, and she’d lost her footing, that was all. The keyblade morphed: first into light, then nothing at all. Abruptly, the smile fell. But the least she could do was laugh. She pivoted on her heel, short hair fluttering about, and the giggle escaping her lips belonged more to a boy deflecting a friend’s companionable ribbing than her paltry attempt at brushing aside Roxas’ concern. “You should worry more about yourself,” she said. “You barely made the Heartless cut today!”

His face twitched, half into a smile she knew well, but half looking like he was about to say something. A protest? A retort? She had an inkling of what sentiment the furrow of his brows signified: worry or sadness or perhaps even anger, as he so often insisted to shoulder on her behalf. But in the end he said nothing. Nothing about the distant glances he’d caught her stealing so often at the sky, as though expecting it to be another color. Nothing about her slowness to respond to the call of her name, and nothing about Axel or his absence or the way she’d seen Roxas brush him away when they passed each other in the shared hallway leading to separate rooms.

“I’ll pay this time,” he told her, minutes later, reaching for her sleeve as she reached into her pocket for the spare change the Heartless had dropped. She nodded in quiet assent, her eyes trailing the movement of his hand as he rang the sleepy-eyed clerk, sliding the money over the counter. Her gaze fixing at the condensation dripping between her fingers as they shared their ice cream in silence, and it was just as well that he said nothing else. It wasn’t so bad. Companionable or otherwise, silence was its own reward—or so she was learning.

–

Those first few days were difficult if only because it meant she had to face Roxas. It was funny to put it that way, but facing Axel… _not_ facing Axel was easier, because he’d been avoiding them, her and the subject both, and there was something reassuring about that—there was nothing pleasant in his rejection, but at least it meant she didn’t need to answer to him. At least not for the time being.

“He’s a jerk is what he is. He hurt you. Don’t you think he could’ve at least said sorry?” Roxas had said. She hadn’t known what to do with the tone of his voice then, the cadence of annoyance that crept into anger threatening to boil over into fury. A distant part of herself couldn’t help but think this sort of outburst would not fly unnoticed within the confines of the castle, though she’d known it would only rub him further the wrong way if she said it aloud.

She’d shrugged, dropping her gaze to her lap, her hand curling into a fist around the ice cream’s flimsy wrapper, and at last she’d heard her own voice murmuring to the buildings below. “It’s not his fault. And besides…” Before she’d known it her lips had quirked, pulling into a miserable facsimile of a smile. “I wouldn’t be here with you right now if he hadn’t brought me back.” 

What she’d said hadn’t been untrue, but she’d turned abruptly to look him squarely in the eye regardless, compelled by some force to gauge his immediate reaction. And before she could think of the crumpled-up reports on her desk or Axel’s cold shoulder or the way Roxas had looked at her weeks ago, after Riku had called her a sham, the first time she’d asked him what had it meant for the Organization to call them _special_ , Roxas had smiled uneasily back, and agreed to drop the subject.

And that distant part of her mind had swiftly let itself be heard, urging her to believe that the prick in her chest couldn’t have been anything besides relief.

–

She woke up alone to the slow red-lighted beeping of the alarm clock. She hadn’t slept well in days; she thought it had been a week, though it had always been hard to tell when one day ended and the next slid in to take its place. She dated and labeled all her reports, and factually recognized the significance of ticking clocks and ringing towers, of the telltale passing between sunrise and sunset, but in practice time operated more like an abstract than anything else, unpredictable and unknowable. The hours blurred seamlessly into one another on some occasions, but more often they felt unbearably slow, long moments of sleep and work and report-writing keeping her up late stretching into a gray eternity filling her head with white noise and static.

Especially now. Especially here, every second spent in the castle feeling like a prisoner in confinement as she waited with bated breath for what punishment would be meted out to her. Every day she woke up to the sight of a dark city outside her room’s tiny window, and every night she bade its eerie skyscrapers a temporary goodbye as she pulled down the curtains and turned off the lights, tucking herself into bed in the uncomfortable combination of Organization jacket and bare feet. With her newfound recapture the superficial veneer of her old routine had been swiftly restored, but it was difficult not to notice that the paper Saix had handed to her detailing which Heartless she ought to defeat and where had been a very short list. The message was clear enough. They were debating on whether she was worth keeping.

But another week passed, then two. Nothing changed. Her missions still ended earlier and earlier; eventually it dawned on her that the punishment as she had dreaded it would never come. Only the tattered scraps of paper bearing her handwriting and overflowing the trashcan signaled otherwise, but that at least wasn’t anything she couldn’t already expect. She could force herself to rewrite report after report by remembering this was a far cry from being turned into a Dusk, or worse. It could always be worse. This was what she told herself, bent over her desk with her eyes bleary and her face numbed by the force of a slap, and it took no small effort not to dwell on the fact that the thought hardly made the present moment any more bearable; that in fact it brought her no semblance of comfort at all.

–

All her good dreams ended too quickly. Waking up was akin to a jolt, a forceful pull across the barrier separating the real world from the false one her mind retreated to during her long deep slumbers. Gone were the searing sand and eternally bright sky and an afternoon spent parrying blows from makeshift wooden swords, and the dizzying ground that awaited her at the bottom of a backwards stumble turned out to be nothing harder than the thin sheets and uncomfortable mattress of her own bed.

Once she had called those dreams a comfort, something warm and pleasant to cling to when she felt cold and stifled under her blanket, and to an extent they still were. But Riku had been right to cut down her fantasies from where he sat across from her, at breakfast in one of Hollow Bastion’s inner chambers, murmuring in that restrained voice of his that she wasn’t really her, and so those dreams hadn’t really been hers either—just pieces of the memories she’d unknowingly stolen from Sora, and she’d abstractly imagined a seashell surfacing from the bottom of the metaphorical ocean, washed ashore by the tide of her slumber. It had made more sense when she thought of them like that: something sparkling and nameless she thought was hers for the taking. Put that way, what she had done was almost forgivable.

“Do you understand?” Of course, Riku had added, he didn’t blame her for making the mistake. He was hard to read behind the blindfold, but she thought his voice had tried to be understanding, and she’d smiled despite herself.

“They’re pretty memories,” was all she’d said in reply.

He would let her go days later, his parting words an ultimatum disguised as a choice, and it was only afterwards that she wondered why she hadn’t half the mind to turn around and ask him why. The only real thing he had given her was his time. A gesture of kindness, perhaps; but who did he owe it to, really? Her, the puppet who stole everything she didn’t borrow, or the friend he missed so dearly—the boy whose eyes he saw in hers?

The Riku in her dreams, smiling freely and unburdened by blindfolds and dark coats, never replied.

–

Staring down the girl with the pretty white dress and sad blue eyes across the pale blank room she was confined in, a sharp contrast to the disused, cobwebbed appearance the mansion had cultivated from its exterior. Her black hair and coat were an anomaly, a stain, but the girl who’d called herself a witch had smiled with a frankness that compelled her to return it, even if it hurt.

“What was Sora like?” The question had left her before she could help it. “I only know bits and pieces… and I never asked Riku. But you said you saw his memories. You must know what he’s like.”

When Namine didn’t answer right away Xion said, “I just wanted to know. It’s okay. My decision isn’t going to change.”

A moment passed. The other girl’s gaze had drifted away from her to fix on the ceramic roses, and her voice was so soft Xion almost thought she had imagined it when Namine said, “He’s… a lot like you.”

Another question rose up her throat. But then she couldn’t hear herself over DiZ’s voice, harsh and intruding and calling her what she was, and so she let it go.

Her only thought as she fell to Axel’s blows was that Namine had to be telling the truth. She had to be.

–

Sunset casting veins of light on his face and dripping blue eyes, and those tears were hot on her cheek even as she felt the ice, crawling up her spine and freezing her insides, so quick and sudden as if the bruising and bleeding had ceased merely so the biting chill could take over. She looked up, tried to say something, but her words became garbled to her through his strangled cry, the warmth radiating from the arms cradling her folded body, the heavy haze spreading pleasantly in her mind—already.

Already it was over. She wondered if the end would come half as peacefully to her if it had been anyone else. But it wasn’t just anyone, was it? It was Roxas. Roxas, who was her good friend and so kind besides, who would never have hurt her, who she had to provoke and taunt into landing those blows and hitting her in all the places that counted. She wondered what it would take, what words she needed to say to make him stop looking at her like that, so inconsolably, as though the sky had split open or the ground had caved in from underneath them when really, nothing so drastic had happened. Couldn’t he see the sky and the earth were still in the places they should be? There was nothing to worry about. The only thing that had happened was that she’d fulfilled her purpose.

“It’ll be all right now. You did the right thing.” Those were the words she’d have wanted to hear, were the positions reversed and he was the one on the ground. Had Riku chosen differently she was certain it would be him hovering above her, murmuring the words as she met her end by his blade, and like everything else he said there wouldn’t be a single ounce of untruth to them. But she could feel her strength drifting away and her voice drying in her throat, and she knew her next words needed to count. Her last words. The thought was a pebble sinking its weight into the bottom of a distant sea, the sun setting in a horizon she’d seen in Sora’s dreams and twice as beautiful with her own eyes, the one she never took her friends to see. Her only regret if she were allowed to have them, but after she returned to Sora and her memories dissolved into his reality there would be no need to think of that any longer, would there? All the regret, all the hurt fading away, like dust on a slate or sand against the shore. Every bruise and every cut and every lonely moment blurring as her body heeded the call of every dream she’d wished would last just a second longer, and couldn’t Roxas understand that? He needed to; he had to. Peace filled her then, buoyant and overflowing, and it was with the last of her breaths that she grasped the strength for what she needed to say next.

_It’ll be all right now. You did the right thing._

“Don’t be sad,” she said instead. Her smile was weak. Her tired arm moved, reaching for his face, his cheek, the tear rolling down from it, and her voice was a faraway echo, a vestige even to herself. “Roxas, don’t be sad…” But somehow that only seemed to deepen his frown.

 _I’m not sad,_ she tried again. She felt herself feebly mouthing the words, but no sound came out, and soon she gave up—but it was true. She wasn’t sad. She felt… She couldn’t feel, could she? But this… this realization, knowing that her duty was done, that there was nothing more she could do, no more transgressions she needed to repay—this feeling, or a frighteningly close mimicry of one, dropping from her chest into her stomach and taking root inside her, it wasn’t sadness. It wasn’t pain. It wasn’t anything she had the strength to express in words, but she wasn’t hurting, and she only hoped he understood that much. See? Don’t be sad, Roxas. Don’t be sad. You’ll be better off now. There’s nothing to worry about.

She dropped her hand, and her eyes blinked upwards, so she could at least look at him as she faded, but her vision was clouding over, and already she had forgotten not to cry. Oh, came the thought, a distant prickle compared to the heat stinging her cheeks. A far cry from being slapped, yet somehow worse. Then, disappointment. She’d ruined it all over again, hadn’t she?

The roots twisted, pulsing like veins in the hollow space between her stomach and throat. There was nothing there to hurt, there’d never been, and yet it stung. Her breath caught, and for a second that was an eternity she was sure this was it, the end, this was the moment it would all stop.

She couldn’t see his face anymore. She didn’t need to; in her mind’s eye she saw Axel’s guilt and Riku’s sorrow and Namine’s resignation and even her own visage, the expression she so clearly recognized as her own in the mirror, smiling back at her like the boy she’d never truly met—the one she would be reunited with—but soon…

 _Soon,_ and she clung onto the thought fiercely, even as the sky and the ground and the rest of her crumbled away, falling into a thousand pieces as easily as falling asleep. Leaving for the only place she hoped, trusted, knew she would belong.

**Author's Note:**

> A line from the novelization where Xion lamented having to wake up "because she had been having so much fun in her dreams" was very memorable to me. This isn't totally timeline accurate, but it's what I felt like writing.


End file.
